Assholes Read online

  Other philosophers have developed ideas of “moral status” and “mutual recognition,” most notably Fichte (e.g., on how one person’s “summons” can awaken another person into freedom and mutual regard), Hegel (on the unequal regard between master and slave), Sartre (on shame or sexual desire), and Buber (on the “I-Thou” relation we stand in to each and all Others, in contrast with the “I-It” relation we bear to mere things). Or as contemporary moral philosophers might say, in blander but perhaps clearer terms, morality is “second personal,” in at least the following way.22

  If being a person with basic moral status means anything, it at the very least means that one is owed respect and consideration as a being endowed with capacity to reason. In particular, people are endowed with powers that enable them to consider and evaluate how someone has acted. A mountain, whale, or tree, though deserving of consideration and appreciation in its own right, lacks the range of abilities needed to question the justifiability of what others have done. The community of persons is, in this way, special.23 I, as an ordinary human person, have special powers of self-consciousness, reasoning, and judgment. I can observe someone acting, as a mere event in the order of things, but also ask (if only to myself) certain questions of justification. Why, I might ask, should an act such as that be acceptable? In particular, is such an act justifiable to me if it was done in my direction, given how it might affect me?

  Likewise, any one of us, so endowed, can ask what would be justifiable to another person, from his or her particular point of view. Is that something she can reasonably find acceptable, given the consequences for her? Or could she reasonably complain of how she is in effect being treated? In that case, what we think another could or could not accept should have special significance for us and how we act. It will influence our choices, at least if we are at all morally concerned. Each of us, in acting, has to consider not only what might make the world go better rather than worse from an impersonal point of view—factoring in the mountain, the whale, and the tree—but also what could be acceptable to each and every other one of us, for reasons arising from the different, distinctive personal standpoint of each separate person in our common world.

  That is not to say that just any complaint someone voices in a conversation should carry the day, as though one always needed explicit or implicit permission from everyone who could be affected by one’s choices, no matter how unreasonable those people might be. The objections or complaints we actually voice sometimes reflect ignorance of crucial facts or lack of concern with what is reasonably acceptable from everyone’s point of view. We can be ignorant or selfish, or both.

  Neither are our complaints and objections always or inevitably ill founded in these ways, however. So when someone does object to a particular act, with a quizzical glare or loud words, there is usually some reason to think that the person may have a reasonable complaint. Even if the objection is ultimately unreasonable, it also might have an element of truth. Accordingly, one of our basic moral responsibilities is to hear people out, to at least take seriously the reasons they give for wanting to be treated differently, even if we ultimately object. The expectation, in other words, is for us to recognize the person objecting, in something like the way a deliberative body grants someone in the room the right to speak before the group. This is, as we might put it, part and parcel of basic moral respect—that is, respect not simply for the person’s complaint but for the person who makes it.

  The asshole, by contrast, is wholly immunized against the complaints of others. Whether or not the complaint is ultimately reasonable, the person is not registered, from the asshole’s point of view, as worthy of consideration. The person who complains is not seen as a potential source of reasonable complaint but is simply walled out. If the person complaining is “standing up for herself,” in order to be recognized, it is as though she were physically present but morally nonexistent in the asshole’s view of the world.

  That is why otherwise coolheaded people fall into a fit of rage or lash out at the asshole: they are fighting to be recognized. They are not fighting for the small benefit of having the asshole move to the back of the line or, more generally, for a slightly more fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of cooperation. The person taking a stand against the asshole is fighting to be registered in the asshole’s point of view as morally real. She struggles not simply to be heard but to be seen. She struggles to be seen, in Thomas Nagel’s phrase, as “one among others equally real.”24

  The fight can become extraordinarily frustrating because the asshole usually wins: his sense of entitlement is entrenched, so there is usually no getting through. (Hence one may spontaneously desire to give the man a sound beating, as though that would help.)25 The fully cooperative person is accustomed to listening when people complain, and used to being heard when even a suggestion of complaint is made. That is how cooperative people normally work out what is acceptable to all, what the moral equality of each person requires. This comes to feel natural, expected, a matter of course. The asshole, by contrast, is equally accustomed to walling others out. He does it all the time. This is comfortable for him. And he is exceptionally good at it: when others complain, he easily dismisses the objection, or quickly finds convincing arguments that rationalize the objection away, and moves on. He compliments himself on how good he is at this because he is very good at it indeed.

  OVERMORALIZATION?

  We have seen that the asshole is important to us for moral reasons. His sense of special entitlement clashes with our own sense that he morally should recognize us as an equal. We have built this sense of entitlement into our basic account of what an asshole is. Here, however, one might object that we are overmoralizing the asshole concept. Can’t someone count as an asshole but wholly lack a sense of moral entitlement? Can’t he simply be thoroughly self-absorbed, like Turnbull or Updike, or most teenagers? Can’t he simply be extremely difficult or just clueless?

  This line of questioning is important because our theory is a proposal about what all assholes have in common. It is a problem if some people fit our definition but do not count as assholes, or if there are true assholes our definition leaves out. Apparent counterexamples such as those just noted could well mean that we should wipe the slate clean and relax our claim that the asshole has a moral sense of entitlement—that we should de-moralize the concept. How, then, might those examples be accounted for?

  It is of course fine to call someone an asshole when he is simply self-absorbed or extremely difficult to get along with. When someone cuts one off in traffic, one can appropriately call him an asshole without first finding out whether he did this out of entitlement (in asking at the next traffic light, it could become clear that he merely made a mistake). It makes little difference whether the driver really is, strictly speaking, properly classified as an asshole. The same might go for the difficult person. If your friend is flummoxed by his encounters with an especially difficult person, you might say, “Don’t worry about it. He’s just an asshole,” at once affirming your friend’s right to better treatment and advising that he probably should not expect the difficult person to change. These ways of calling someone an asshole seem useful and fine, even without looking further into why the person acts as he does.

  Yet, even in such cases, it remains an open question whether the person at issue really is an asshole, whether he is best classified as that type of person. Perhaps he is better classified as a jerk, schmuck, or douche bag, or just someone who is insensitive to social cues. To this classificatory question, our theory offers an answer: it delineates the class of assholes from the vast and motley array of personality types. In so defining the asshole, our strategy is to start by identifying the significance assholes have for us—the significance of moral recognition. We then tailor our characterization of the person around that kind of significance. The asshole’s entrenched moral sense of entitlement is thus essential for our account. We can happily admit that there may be marginal or borderline ca
ses that do not quite fit our theory. But, otherwise, a proper asshole always has an underlying sense of moral entitlement. We may have to look deep within his soul to find it, but it is there.

  Turnbull’s self-absorption might illustrate the point. Wallace emphasizes it to explain why Turnbull is so unhappy, especially in light of his “bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair.”26 Wallace naturally also mentions Turnbull’s (and Updike’s) misogyny, and indeed the idea of “getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to” can be seen as a misogynistic entitlement: an unfounded entitlement to something that, from a moral point of view, must be freely offered or given, and so won’t necessarily be available as one prefers. Plato or Aristotle would regard a moral vice of character as itself undermining human happiness or flourishing, which partly just consists in virtuous living. But the point might hold even if we take the more characteristically modern view that virtue and happiness potentially come apart. Turnbull’s unhappy self-absorption can reflect his failure to experience the real and profound connection with others afforded by true mutual respect, a connection that won’t necessarily come along with the pleasures of basic consensual physical contact.

  We might add that thorough self-absorption is in any case itself a moral failing that indicates entitlement in our sense: the self-absorbed person feels or presumes that he need take no account of others and, if asked, will often give reasons why this is justified (“I can’t do it right now,” “I’m overwhelmed,” “Can’t you see that I’ve got serious problems!”). These are potentially reasons why the person should not be asked to give others what would otherwise be their due, and how we evaluate those reasons will decide whether someone counts as an asshole. If his reasons are good enough (perhaps he is severely depressed), then he is not an asshole. Or even if the reasons given aren’t especially good, if he apologizes for his actions later, he isn’t an asshole; he is not immunized against the complaints of others in the way the asshole is. Many jerks, schmucks, and clueless or oblivious souls are pretty incorrigible but won’t go to bat for that way of being. They might even apologize, even as they easily fall back into their usual ways later that day or week. The asshole is, in contrast, incorrigible in a special, willful, or defensive way.

  But what if someone really believes that everyone is entitled to look out for number one? He might live in a defensive crouch or posture of selfish opportunism, and perhaps act a lot like an asshole, but he wouldn’t say that he’s special in any fundamental sense. He’ll say that everyone is acting in his same hypercompetitive way and even regret that this is the way of the world. But, so he says, in getting ahead, he’s acting within his rights.

  Now, if someone really and truly has this cynical view of the world, despite an honest but thwarted desire to cooperate with his fellow moral equals, then he isn’t an asshole, even when he acts like one. But if he really is genuine in his views, he’ll presumably be open to discuss and reconsider whether his take on the world can be reasonably maintained. He won’t then be entrenched and immunized in the asshole’s way. On the other hand, many proper assholes tell themselves such universalistic stories without believing them deep down. They might even get themselves to really believe them mainly to keep themselves reassured. This species of asshole pays homage to morality by invoking a veneer of impartial universality, in contrast with the supremely smug asshole, who needs little more for his for justification beyond saying, “Well, it is me. How could this [pointing to himself] not deserve special treatment.” An asshole can’t simply take himself as his reason without standing outside morality altogether (making him more like a psychopath).27 But assholes can vary considerably in the degree to which they require a pretense of universality to keep themselves feeling secure.

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  1. Michael Hastings, “The Runaway General,” Rolling Stone, July 8–22, 2010, www.​rolling​stone.​com/​politics/​news/​17390/​119236.

  2. Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman (New York: Berkley, 1974).

  3. David Brooks all but calls Gibson an asshole in “The Gospel of Mel Gibson,” New York Times, July 15, 2010, www.​nytimes.​com/​2010/​07/​16/​opinion/​16brooks.​html.

  4. Robert I. Sutton, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t, 1st ed. (New York: Warner Business Books, 2007), advises business managers to adopt a policy of zero tolerance of assholes in the workplace, offering helpful suggestions about how to deal with them when they simply cannot be fired. Our initial target is a philosophical account that might support and supplement the good advice already available.

  5. Our hero Rousseau was unfortunately quite an asshole himself, or maybe something worse. He eventually realized that something was amiss in his repeatedly fathering children with Thérèse Lavasseur and then summarily sending them away to an orphanage. See The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1953).

  6. By “interpersonal” relations we mean cooperative relations with a more or less socially defined structure, in contrast, say, with individuals interacting in a condition of anarchy such as Thomas Hobbes’s famous state of nature. If one can be an asshole in the state of nature, Hobbes would regard this as fully justified self-defense. In conditions of society, by contrast, assholes are akin to Hobbes’s famous Foole, who joins the social contract but then breaks or cheats the law.

  7. Translation by Benjamin Jowett, http://​classics.​mit.edu/​Plato/​gorgias.​html.

  8. The point carries over to other proposals in moral theory. “Experimental philosophy” isn’t fit to establish or refute them, at least not without further, properly controversial assumptions about what a given proposal is trying to do.

  9. This is probably true of McChrystal, who not only apologized for the disdainful comments mentioned earlier but also has a long track record of dedicated public service.

  10. Harry G. Frankfurt, in On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), plausibly shows how the term “bullshit” has rich descriptive content, even as it initially appears as a term of abuse. The same may be true of “chickenshit” and “horseshit,” which differ from each other and from “bullshit” in descriptive meaning. Our inquiry lies within this distinguished line of research. We hope our theory prompts one to think, “Hey, I’ve met that guy,” and thus provides demonstrative evidence that there is at least one asshole and probably more. One could so embrace the existence of assholes even if one had quibbles about the theory’s details.

  11. Someone actually spoke (roughly) the stated sentence to me spontaneously in conversation. That isn’t decisive evidence that it can be true or false to say that someone is an asshole, and not simply a way of expressing one’s feelings of disapproval (as in saying “boo!” to the opposing sports team or in using harsh terms such as “shithead” or “cocksucker,” which invoke an unflattering descriptive image without making any claim to truth, properly speaking). Further evidence would be a conditional sentence such as “If an asshole cuts you off in traffic, then it is appropriate to lay on the horn.” Here the term “asshole” does not plainly reflect either approval or disapproval. Still better evidence is a sentence that expresses thoroughgoing endorsement, such as “Yes, I am an asshole, and proud of it,” perhaps said in all sincerity by a supreme asshole who is taunting his subjects with this pronouncement. See The Onion’s headline “Asshole Admits to Being Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move,” May 19, 2004, www.​theonion.​com/​articles/​asshole-​admits-​to-​being-​asshole-​in-​supreme-​asshole,​1172/. We can add that taking asshole discourse to aim at stating truths doesn’t mean that we do not also use it to swear and express disapproval, as in “Gosh, what an asshole!” or “That guy is such an asshole!” When a speaker calls someone an asshole, this can be seen to pragmatically indicate that he or she disapproves. For this view of moral judgment, see Da
vid Copp, “Realist-Expressivism: A Neglected Option for Moral Realism,” Social Philosophy and Policy 18, no. 2 (2001): 1–43; and Stephen Finlay, “Value and Implicature,” Philosophers’ Imprint 5, no. 4 (July 2005): 1–20, http://​hdl.​handle.​net/​2027/​spo.​3521354.​0005.​004.

  12. Eric Melech, www.​urban​dictionary.​com/​define.​php?​term=​asshole.

  13. One entry in the Urban Dictionary describes the asshole as “a man who could tempt the Pope into a fight” (Bwillis, www.​urban​dicti​onary.​com/​define.​php?​term=​asshole&page=4). It is apparently true across cultures that the most common source of homicide is “altercations of relatively trivial origin” that often have to do with small slights. See Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 125.

  14. Here I point to a common feeling without denying that many people have a quite different attitude in light of special intimate or recreational purposes. For the general ambivalent or hostile feelings about such matters, see Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” in Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  15. David Foster Wallace, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think (Re John Updike’s Toward the End of Time),” in Consider the Lobster (New York: Little, Brown, 2006). Originally published as “John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?,” New York Observer, October 13, 1997, www.​observer.​com/​1997/​10/​john-​updike-​champion-​literary-​phallocrat-​drops-​one-​is-​this-​finally-​the-​end-​for-​magnificent-​narcissists/.